By William Crooks
Local Journalism Initiative
Local English magazine, The Townships Sun, launched its new online archives and rolled out plans for a year of activities while celebrating its 50th year of publication at its annual general meeting Sept. 22. The Record attended to get the entire scoop.
Archives Project
The Archives Project saw the entire 50 years of its publication scanned and uploaded to the Bibliothèque et archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ), where they can be consulted free of charge. The archives are comprised of 525 issues, with a total of 14,135 pages (10,659 tabloid pages and 3,476 magazine-size pages).
“Our gratitude goes to the Bélanger-Gardner Foundation of the Bishop’s University Library for funding this project,” said David Wright, chair of the Townships Sun board. “We also thank John Mackley, who scanned the majority of the back issues in PDFs. They are archival quality and OCR-searchable.”
“We couldn’t have done it without Jody Robinson, Executive Director of the Eastern Townships Resource Centre, who gave us many helpful consultations, and provided a home for a complete set of back issues,” said Rachel Garber, Editor. Garber coordinated the project, which also organized all the past issues and involved the purchase of acid-free boxes to protect the Townships Sun’s own print archives.
50th Anniversary Committee
The Townships Sun’s Assistant Editor, Marie Moliner, will head its 50th Anniversary Committee, joined by Ana Martinez, one of our newest board members.
“I left the Townships about 50 years ago. So, it is an honour to be recruited to lead the 50th Anniversary celebrations of the Townships Sun. I hope many, many volunteers will join the small and mighty Team 50, @TownshipsSun, so we can make this 50th anniversary a community building opportunity sans pareil,” said Moliner. She has been back in the Townships since 2020.
